Small projects

Deck railings still need to be built, but I made lattice panels to keep Pepper the dog from visiting the frogs under the deck. I hate, hate the diagonal lattice from Lowe's and HD. Or maybe I just hate that there is only one choice in lattice style. These instructions were useful, using my mom's pnumatic stapler. I've seen this style of lattice under front porches all over town, though mostly under victorians and 1910s houses. Sometimes I think what I really wanted was an even older house.




This is one of the old street markers. It's more aged than the house, I think. There are modern, taller, reflective signs planted next to them, but these still stick up all over the older areas of Jacksonville. This one is across the street from me in a park. All the paint was gone and it was mildewy so I finally re-did it. I debated using reflective letters from the hardware store but thought this way was more authentic. I enlarged the Arial font, cut out the individual letters and traced them onto the scrubbed, primed and painted post, then filled in the outlines with exterior glossy black. At least a full eight hours of work. There is another grungy one across the park, too.

Locksets

Last week I moved the bed into a corner to make the bedroom look bigger. Last night I thought, "What this fancy new bedroom needs is a working door lockset so the door will stay closed." I pulled the invoice for the replacement bathroom lockset from a few years ago and looked up its sku # on Van Dyke's website. The price had increased $4, to $20! Yeep!

So I thought about the remaining five doors with original locksets and found that the only operating latch of the bunch was in the door separating the public from the private side of the house. If I switched this one with the bedroom set, then the bedroom door would latch closed. I was just about to install this in the bedroom door when I saw it had a single screw on one of the big flat sides, holding the box together.

I'd never been curious about the workings of the original bathroom lockset mainly because I was newcomer to old houses and the grunge that can go with them. I knew that if I opened the bath lockset, roach eggs and spiders and rust would pop out and stick to my face. Now, I don't care as much.

Undoing the box, I discovered it's really very simple inside. The guts are rough cast metal. The latches seen on the outside are brass. The 6 parts all overlap each other with cast pegs. There is no oiling necessary. In fact, these look like a great engineering project for elementary kids, like something you'd find in a toy catalog.

I'm glad I had bought that new $16 lockset for the bathroom, which is a room that's nice to lock, like in the movies when you're home alone and naked in the shower and a guy with a machete breaks in. But I can almost kick myself that a little $.35 spring, circling the peg under the end of the pink arrow and extending to the hook on the right, is the reason these five doors won't stay latched and closed. I could see how the lock works too, and now I just need to find a key. I assume all the locks used the same key. Cheap and simple solutions are super!

1930 census

We've been stuck inside the house for three days this week during an endless tropical storm. By day two I'd read both my library books, cut two inches off my hair, and had had enough of Monopoly and Scrabble. I took advantage of the electricity and internet we were lucky to have and looked up the 1930 census record for the Mercks, the first census after this house and the one next door were built.

Many people in the area worked for the "steam railroad" or as clerks. The census taker valued the house at $7000, based on what the Mercks told them was their purchase price, I'll assume. The Mercks were the same age as me (Jason is a bit older than me) when they bought the house and "wife" Marion Merck is listed as "male". A few lines down is the house number for the now-empty lot where there is a storm-water pumping station. And it looks like the poor house next door to us began life as a rental, possibly doomed to stay that way.

Looking down the list most of the wives didn't have occupations outside the house. That Marion went to work as a saleswoman at a drugstore, and not even the one owned by her husband, is pretty cool. Prior to marrying Mr. Merck, she lived with her first husband, listed as a produce salesman, a few blocks from the first Merck drugstore. Here is a 1947 picture of the Merck store when it was located downtown, a few years before closing:

This entry has a lot more info. I found most of it by searching the old city directories at the main library.

More arachnaphobia!

Ew. My mom read the last post and sent me these current photos from her yard.